The goal of this website is to be a concise, visual reference for how git commands work. I often draw pictures like this on a whiteboard for my colleagues, so I figured I would make a nice electronic version once and for all.

I chose to draw the images using TeX and PGF/TikZ. I originally tried using Graphviz, but unfortunately there is no way to tell it how to lay out the graph exactly. Using TikZ, I was able to create a domain-specific language to represent commit graphs, and I think the result turned out quite well.

All of the common macros are stored in common.tex. Each image source includes this file. To see an example of how to use these macros, look at commit-master.tex.

To generate the image files, I first create PDFs using pdflatex, and from there I create SVGs and PNGs using pdf2svg and convert, respectively.

Copyright © 2010, Mark Lodato. Japanese translation © 2010, Kazu Yamamoto. Korean translation © 2011, Sean Russian translation © 2012, Alex Sychev. French translation © 2012, Michel Lefranc. Chinese translation © 2012, wych. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.